Dickens wrote Oliver Twist partly as an attack on the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which made conditions in workhouses deliberately harsh to deter the poor from seeking help. The workhouse scenes are based on reality.
Oliver is presented as naturally good despite everything — Dickens suggests that goodness is inherent and can survive even the worst circumstances. This was a controversial view in an era that often blamed the poor for their own poverty.
Dickens shows how poverty and lack of opportunity drive ordinary people into crime. The Artful Dodger and Charley Bates are not naturally evil — they are products of a society that offered them nothing better.
The mystery of Oliver's true parentage is central to the plot. In Dickens's moral world, Oliver's genteel origins explain his natural goodness — a belief we would now question, but which Dickens presents with total sincerity.
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